Nope, PC and Internet penetration in the US is about 40-50%. That means many/most folks have purchased a PC.
How do you get from "40-50%" to "most folks?" Are we unclear on what "most" means? "Most" doesn't mean "almost half," or even "a little more than half." It means "the dominant majority."
A PC today is actually cheaper than a color TV was 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago was 1985. A color TV in 1985 cost about what a color TV costs today: between $100 and $1000. Adjusting for inflation, that's between $170 and $1700 in 2003 dollars. Can you buy a computer for less than $1700? Certainly. Can you buy one for less than $170? No.
So no, the barrier to entry is NOT cost (of the PC/thin client).
Yeah, it is.
My parents clearly have the $$ and they have a PC, and they have broadband but the PC is down half the time for a wide variety of reasons going back to complexity: viruses, network/router configuration issues, etc.
Did you not read my comment? I specifically said that Windows and Linux are crap. That's because Windows and Linux are based on 20th-century ideas. They're obsolete. The barrier to entry today is not complexity. The barrier to entry 20 years ago, when Windows was designed, or 30 years ago, when the system on which Linux is based was designed, was complexity. But today it's not.
People DO want a turn-key appliance to do computing.
The phrase "turn-key appliance" means nothing, and is also a shameful mixing of metaphors. What you're saying is that people want computers to be easy. Modern computers are. They want computers to be reliable. Modern computers are. These things are no longer a barrier to entry.
The barrier to entry today is cost.
Your confusion comes from the fact that you think 20- or 30-year old computer technology is modern. It's not.
Hey, look, yet another in what's an increasingly long series of dumbasses who don't know the difference between a Web browser cache and the Google cache.
Look at 17 USC 108(a)(1). Google is a publicly traded, for-profit company. It is obviously using its cache as a competitive advantage over other, similar companies. It's not a library or archive.
By publishing your website, you are granting an (implied) licence to the world to create cached copies of the website.
That's an assertion, not a statement of fact. I grant no such thing. Just because the technology enables it doesn't mean we're all giving you permission to do it.
The argument Google would use is that they're just going a step further in having a publicly available cache.
But that isn't true. When you go to the Google cache, you see out-of-date representations of Web pages. A real cache would never have an out-of-date copy in it, because with every request it would check to see if the page had been updated since the previous caching. Google's cache doesn't do that.
Fine, "the idea theorized..." would be better wording in this context.
"The idea theorized" would be terrible "wording" in any context. Good God, man, what would possess you to mangle the language like that?
First of all, ideas don't do anything. They're inanimate. A little metaphorical personification is okay when it serves a specific figurative or illustrative purpose, but this is definitely not one of those cases.
Second, "theorize" is the worst kind of reverse construction. The rule of thumb is generally avoid words ending with "-ize." While there are some perfectly acceptable -- normalize, galvanize, agonize, baptize -- most are bastardizations: centralize, royalize, latentize, and yes, theorize. Just because a word has slipped into the dictionary through common usage doesn't mean you should employ it, you know?
Even if that weren't the case, nothing is actually being "theorized" here. Nobody has formed a theory about anything.
And don't even get me started on "wording." The bodies of a million dead writers are spinning in their graves.
No, it would only be legal if the Google cache reflected only the most recent state of a Web page at any given time. For example, when you ask Google to show you a cached page, it would have to interrogate the server to see if the page has changed. If it has, it has to flush its cache and fetch the most up-to-date content.
The Internet Archive is also blatantly illegal, obviously. But again, nobody has stopped it because nobody has wanted to yet. Pretty much anybody could at any time.
All those instances of "The page has changed, but here's Google's cache or an Internet Archive page showing what it used to look like" would have to go away.
But "opt-out" is not permitted by law. Under the law, you are not permitted to make copies of somebody else's work unless given permission. Google's position is that they make copies unless that permission is expressly retracted. That's not compatible with the law.
All it would take is one suit to shut the cache down. Like I said, nobody's done it yet because nobody's felt the need. That could change at any moment.
He was referring to people who don't yet have computers.
I think he's off the mark, though. While it's true that most people don't use a computer, I don't think the barrier is complexity. Yes, Windows and Linux are crap from the user's perspective; we all know that. But we're starting to figure out how to make computers that are both reliable and easy to use. We're not there yet, not perfectly, but we're getting closer. The barrier to entry right now is cost. Computers, even with the advent of the mini, still cost hundreds of dollars. That's completely out of line with what the average person is willing to spend on a device for e-mail, Web browsing, music, photos and home movies.
I don't see bandwidth getting fast enough in even 5 or 10 years to support a video or photo editing app.
Dude, you couldn't be more right. We're just now getting to the point where the bandwidth inside your computer is sufficient for those kinds of applications. And the applications are only getting bigger. It used to be you needed dozens of megabytes per second for video. Now, with HD, you need gigabytes per second. We can barely do that practically on the motherboard, much less over distances of hundreds of miles.
Do you run your own servers to be online 24x7 to collect your email and serve your web pages?
No, but all of my e-mail messages are downloaded to my computer where they're archived forever, and my Web sites on hosted servers are just FTP-uploaded copies of folders on my Mac.
The proposed solution here...
Did you read some different article? There's no proposed solution. Just pie-in-the-sky ideas which are, frankly, pretty bad.
Bzzt. Google might be based on the idea of indexing all published information, but that doesn't mean they own squat. I give them permission to read and index my Web site and to let people access that index. They have absolutely no claim on the contents of that Site.
Frankly, the Google cache is blatantly illegal. It continues to exist only because nobody has felt the need to shut it down yet. Maybe it'll go on like that forever. Maybe it won't.
Nothing is hard about that. It's called the "public domain," and it's a very old idea.
The problem is when some self-absorbed navel-gazer comes along and tries to re-brand the concept of the public domain in order to advance a political agenda.
Does no one call you? While it's certainly convenient to have your phone on you at all times, with all your contacts in it, being able to make calls is only part of the story. Being able to receive calls is where it's at.
Whether you like the RIAA and the MPAA doesn't figure into this, I don't think. At least it shouldn't. After all, if I met Harald Welte, I might very well decide that I don't like him at all for my own personal reasons. Would that make it okay to ignore his cease-and-desist letters?
The question isn't whether you like somebody or not. The question is whether that somebody has a legitimate claim. If Harald Welte has a legitimate claim, then both the RIAA and the MPAA have legitimate claims, because everybody's basing their positions on the same core principles.
Arguing that it's okay to steal from people you don't like isn't a very sound position, I don't think.
Both meanings of "freedom" you cite apply only to people. A person can be free to do X or he can be free from burden Y. People have freedom because people have will. To be free, in either sense, is to be autonomous and able to act at one's will. The notion doesn't apply to things without will.
To refer to an animal as "free" in either sense is purely colloquial -- "I set the bird free" -- and to refer to inanimate things as "free" is, at best, a metaphor. It cannot be literally true. Now, metaphor is fine, except when it's used to mislead, which I think is the case here.
Now, "free" also means "available at no charge," which is clearly not true of Gnu software. While the programs may be available for no money, there is definitely an opportunity cost associated with them, as clearly illustrated by this very story. If you don't do everything exactly right, some random guy is going to deliver a cease-and-desist letter to you, resulting in a lot of bad publicity and requiring you to spend a lot of time and money making the problem go away.
There's a very simple solution: Stop talking about how Gnu programs are "free." Gnu software is not free in the sense of having no cost, and it can't be free in any other sense because it's not animate.
But that's exactly my point, don't you see? That's the contradiction. You guys want everybody else to play by your rules when it comes to computer programs (those rules being fairly complex and confusing, from my point of view), but you have absolutely no desire to play by other people's rules when it comes to things like music and movies.
And those rules, by contrast, are incredibly simple: Pay for what you take, and don't give people copies. But any time somebody like the RIAA or the MPAA try to enforce those rules, you guys go positively batshit over it.
That's the contradiction. That's what I'm trying to point out. Hopefully somebody will read this and go, "Huh. I don't know if I agree, but he's got a fair point."
My problem is that you seem to have a really weird definition of "free." Your definition of "free" apparently means "do not touch."
I'm not singling you out. I think you, like most people, have probably never given the whole subject much thought. You read on some Web site that "free" means so-n-so, and you adopt that interpretation, without ever really stopping to think that that's not really what "free" means at all.
The Geneva Convention is a legally binding agreement by the signatory nations on how they will treat captured combatants
No. The Conventions cover the treatment of prisoners of war and of captured civilians. They specifically do not address the question of unlawful combatants, that is, individuals who take up arms without the protections accorded to members of an army.
And when hostilities end (as they have in Afghanistan where most of these people were captured) you either need to set up a war crimes tribunal (which provides them their due process) or you need to repatriate them to their home countries.
If we had in our custody members of the Afghan army, that's true. But we don't. We have unlawful combatants.
What's the difference between a soldier and an unlawful combatant, you ask? A soldier is presumed to have been acting under orders and to have no criminal culpability in the acts he committed during the war. You can't charge a soldier with murder for shooting an enemy soldier on the battlefield.
Unlawful combatants do not follow orders and are therefore not granted the presumption of non-culpability that we grant soldiers.
If a US soldier is captured in Vietnam in 1972, under your theory the Vietnamese government could imprison that soldier forever.
Soldiers? No. But if an American civilian took up arms and fought the NVA and was captured in the process, yes, the North Vietnamese could imprison him forever.
Or, if the uniform is your safety argument, take the CIA operative who is caught by the Nicaraguan government in 1986.
That's a legitimate grey area. It doesn't apply here, though, because the people we have in custody were not members of any organized covert agency.
Being more concerned with an agenda than with truth -- in other words, being biased -- is, in fact, a bad thing. Even if the intentions are good, being biased is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, PC and Internet penetration in the US is about 40-50%. That means many/most folks have purchased a PC.
How do you get from "40-50%" to "most folks?" Are we unclear on what "most" means? "Most" doesn't mean "almost half," or even "a little more than half." It means "the dominant majority."
A PC today is actually cheaper than a color TV was 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago was 1985. A color TV in 1985 cost about what a color TV costs today: between $100 and $1000. Adjusting for inflation, that's between $170 and $1700 in 2003 dollars. Can you buy a computer for less than $1700? Certainly. Can you buy one for less than $170? No.
So no, the barrier to entry is NOT cost (of the PC/thin client).
Yeah, it is.
My parents clearly have the $$ and they have a PC, and they have broadband but the PC is down half the time for a wide variety of reasons going back to complexity: viruses, network/router configuration issues, etc.
Did you not read my comment? I specifically said that Windows and Linux are crap. That's because Windows and Linux are based on 20th-century ideas. They're obsolete. The barrier to entry today is not complexity. The barrier to entry 20 years ago, when Windows was designed, or 30 years ago, when the system on which Linux is based was designed, was complexity. But today it's not.
People DO want a turn-key appliance to do computing.
The phrase "turn-key appliance" means nothing, and is also a shameful mixing of metaphors. What you're saying is that people want computers to be easy. Modern computers are. They want computers to be reliable. Modern computers are. These things are no longer a barrier to entry.
The barrier to entry today is cost.
Your confusion comes from the fact that you think 20- or 30-year old computer technology is modern. It's not.
Hey, look, yet another in what's an increasingly long series of dumbasses who don't know the difference between a Web browser cache and the Google cache.
Look at 17 USC 108(a)(1). Google is a publicly traded, for-profit company. It is obviously using its cache as a competitive advantage over other, similar companies. It's not a library or archive.
By publishing your website, you are granting an (implied) licence to the world to create cached copies of the website.
That's an assertion, not a statement of fact. I grant no such thing. Just because the technology enables it doesn't mean we're all giving you permission to do it.
The argument Google would use is that they're just going a step further in having a publicly available cache.
But that isn't true. When you go to the Google cache, you see out-of-date representations of Web pages. A real cache would never have an out-of-date copy in it, because with every request it would check to see if the page had been updated since the previous caching. Google's cache doesn't do that.
Fine, "the idea theorized..." would be better wording in this context.
"The idea theorized" would be terrible "wording" in any context. Good God, man, what would possess you to mangle the language like that?
First of all, ideas don't do anything. They're inanimate. A little metaphorical personification is okay when it serves a specific figurative or illustrative purpose, but this is definitely not one of those cases.
Second, "theorize" is the worst kind of reverse construction. The rule of thumb is generally avoid words ending with "-ize." While there are some perfectly acceptable -- normalize, galvanize, agonize, baptize -- most are bastardizations: centralize, royalize, latentize, and yes, theorize. Just because a word has slipped into the dictionary through common usage doesn't mean you should employ it, you know?
Even if that weren't the case, nothing is actually being "theorized" here. Nobody has formed a theory about anything.
And don't even get me started on "wording." The bodies of a million dead writers are spinning in their graves.
No, it would only be legal if the Google cache reflected only the most recent state of a Web page at any given time. For example, when you ask Google to show you a cached page, it would have to interrogate the server to see if the page has changed. If it has, it has to flush its cache and fetch the most up-to-date content.
The Internet Archive is also blatantly illegal, obviously. But again, nobody has stopped it because nobody has wanted to yet. Pretty much anybody could at any time.
All those instances of "The page has changed, but here's Google's cache or an Internet Archive page showing what it used to look like" would have to go away.
But "opt-out" is not permitted by law. Under the law, you are not permitted to make copies of somebody else's work unless given permission. Google's position is that they make copies unless that permission is expressly retracted. That's not compatible with the law.
All it would take is one suit to shut the cache down. Like I said, nobody's done it yet because nobody's felt the need. That could change at any moment.
He was referring to people who don't yet have computers.
I think he's off the mark, though. While it's true that most people don't use a computer, I don't think the barrier is complexity. Yes, Windows and Linux are crap from the user's perspective; we all know that. But we're starting to figure out how to make computers that are both reliable and easy to use. We're not there yet, not perfectly, but we're getting closer. The barrier to entry right now is cost. Computers, even with the advent of the mini, still cost hundreds of dollars. That's completely out of line with what the average person is willing to spend on a device for e-mail, Web browsing, music, photos and home movies.
I don't see bandwidth getting fast enough in even 5 or 10 years to support a video or photo editing app.
Dude, you couldn't be more right. We're just now getting to the point where the bandwidth inside your computer is sufficient for those kinds of applications. And the applications are only getting bigger. It used to be you needed dozens of megabytes per second for video. Now, with HD, you need gigabytes per second. We can barely do that practically on the motherboard, much less over distances of hundreds of miles.
When "the network is down", people will treat it just like when the power's out today.
Uninterruptible power supplies are a billion-dollar-a-year industry.
Do you run your own servers to be online 24x7 to collect your email and serve your web pages?
...
No, but all of my e-mail messages are downloaded to my computer where they're archived forever, and my Web sites on hosted servers are just FTP-uploaded copies of folders on my Mac.
The proposed solution here
Did you read some different article? There's no proposed solution. Just pie-in-the-sky ideas which are, frankly, pretty bad.
to own all information
Bzzt. Google might be based on the idea of indexing all published information, but that doesn't mean they own squat. I give them permission to read and index my Web site and to let people access that index. They have absolutely no claim on the contents of that Site.
Frankly, the Google cache is blatantly illegal. It continues to exist only because nobody has felt the need to shut it down yet. Maybe it'll go on like that forever. Maybe it won't.
Gee, that would be neat.
Nothing is hard about that. It's called the "public domain," and it's a very old idea.
The problem is when some self-absorbed navel-gazer comes along and tries to re-brand the concept of the public domain in order to advance a political agenda.
buying off congressmen
I wonder if you've got a tight grip on how the whole "representative government" thing is supposed to work.
Change the copyright laws back to the original standards
"Original?" As in the 18th century? Don't think so.
Does no one call you? While it's certainly convenient to have your phone on you at all times, with all your contacts in it, being able to make calls is only part of the story. Being able to receive calls is where it's at.
Whether you like the RIAA and the MPAA doesn't figure into this, I don't think. At least it shouldn't. After all, if I met Harald Welte, I might very well decide that I don't like him at all for my own personal reasons. Would that make it okay to ignore his cease-and-desist letters?
The question isn't whether you like somebody or not. The question is whether that somebody has a legitimate claim. If Harald Welte has a legitimate claim, then both the RIAA and the MPAA have legitimate claims, because everybody's basing their positions on the same core principles.
Arguing that it's okay to steal from people you don't like isn't a very sound position, I don't think.
Let me explain the inherent logical fallacy.
Both meanings of "freedom" you cite apply only to people. A person can be free to do X or he can be free from burden Y. People have freedom because people have will. To be free, in either sense, is to be autonomous and able to act at one's will. The notion doesn't apply to things without will.
To refer to an animal as "free" in either sense is purely colloquial -- "I set the bird free" -- and to refer to inanimate things as "free" is, at best, a metaphor. It cannot be literally true. Now, metaphor is fine, except when it's used to mislead, which I think is the case here.
Now, "free" also means "available at no charge," which is clearly not true of Gnu software. While the programs may be available for no money, there is definitely an opportunity cost associated with them, as clearly illustrated by this very story. If you don't do everything exactly right, some random guy is going to deliver a cease-and-desist letter to you, resulting in a lot of bad publicity and requiring you to spend a lot of time and money making the problem go away.
There's a very simple solution: Stop talking about how Gnu programs are "free." Gnu software is not free in the sense of having no cost, and it can't be free in any other sense because it's not animate.
But that's exactly my point, don't you see? That's the contradiction. You guys want everybody else to play by your rules when it comes to computer programs (those rules being fairly complex and confusing, from my point of view), but you have absolutely no desire to play by other people's rules when it comes to things like music and movies.
And those rules, by contrast, are incredibly simple: Pay for what you take, and don't give people copies. But any time somebody like the RIAA or the MPAA try to enforce those rules, you guys go positively batshit over it.
That's the contradiction. That's what I'm trying to point out. Hopefully somebody will read this and go, "Huh. I don't know if I agree, but he's got a fair point."
My problem is that you seem to have a really weird definition of "free." Your definition of "free" apparently means "do not touch."
I'm not singling you out. I think you, like most people, have probably never given the whole subject much thought. You read on some Web site that "free" means so-n-so, and you adopt that interpretation, without ever really stopping to think that that's not really what "free" means at all.
Information wants to be free unless you're somebody we don't like.
Thje phone - Nokia - first party. The software - nokia - also first party.
You left out a pretty important piece of that equation: the computer.
Do you think Apple would make better software for the nokia phone than Nokia would?
Dude, have you ever seen iSync? The answer is a resounding "yes."
The Geneva Convention is a legally binding agreement by the signatory nations on how they will treat captured combatants
No. The Conventions cover the treatment of prisoners of war and of captured civilians. They specifically do not address the question of unlawful combatants, that is, individuals who take up arms without the protections accorded to members of an army.
And when hostilities end (as they have in Afghanistan where most of these people were captured) you either need to set up a war crimes tribunal (which provides them their due process) or you need to repatriate them to their home countries.
If we had in our custody members of the Afghan army, that's true. But we don't. We have unlawful combatants.
What's the difference between a soldier and an unlawful combatant, you ask? A soldier is presumed to have been acting under orders and to have no criminal culpability in the acts he committed during the war. You can't charge a soldier with murder for shooting an enemy soldier on the battlefield.
Unlawful combatants do not follow orders and are therefore not granted the presumption of non-culpability that we grant soldiers.
If a US soldier is captured in Vietnam in 1972, under your theory the Vietnamese government could imprison that soldier forever.
Soldiers? No. But if an American civilian took up arms and fought the NVA and was captured in the process, yes, the North Vietnamese could imprison him forever.
Or, if the uniform is your safety argument, take the CIA operative who is caught by the Nicaraguan government in 1986.
That's a legitimate grey area. It doesn't apply here, though, because the people we have in custody were not members of any organized covert agency.
Being more concerned with an agenda than with truth -- in other words, being biased -- is, in fact, a bad thing. Even if the intentions are good, being biased is bad.
Dude, they make the PHONE they make the PC software FOR THAT SAME PHONE that is NOT third party!!!
Let me explain this very, very clearly.
1. There's me. That's person number one, okay? The first party.
2. There's Apple. They made my Mac. Okay? Second party.
What party does that make Nokia, or anybody else who comes along?
The expression "third party" is not new, and it shouldn't be hard to understand. And yet, somehow, it seems to baffle more than a few people.
We have a word for these people. That word is "idiots."